Friday, June 26, 2009

Islamist Crazies Alive and Well on the Internet

I found this video via Views From The Occident. The video is a type of eulogy for Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, a militant Salafi terrorist who was killed by a US airstrike in 2006 and demonstrates the fact that Salafi terrorists are still around and have added tacky video editing as a part of their training.Iraq's recent resurgence of violence has been alarming as well as disheartening to see that Iraq's sovereignty looks lengths away from the foreseeable future.

The militant Salafist movements of Iraq are still strong despite a reduction in violence from 2006 and 2007. Reasons for this include the vast numbers of Sunni Iraqi's disenfranchised by the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the unlimited supply of radical Sunni extremists living everywhere from Kashhmir to London. This not so efficient network of radical Salifis provides moral and/or financial support to similar groups in conflict zones (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).

The US military's current strategy is building alliances with Sunni tribes to combat Salafi terrorist groups from the community level and cutting off their recruitment base. However effective these efforts may be in the short run, a long term solution can only be provided by the global Muslim community itself. Salafi strategies of financing Islamic mosques and dawa with the condition that it be headed with Salafi ideology creates an incredible base of Muslims who are complacent to Salafi violence around the world. Not until the dangers of militant Salafism/Wahabism becomes a major discourse in the global Muslim community will there be a significant reduction in the global networks of Islamist terrorists.

The advances made by AQ and its affiliates/allies in a very short period of time (from the late 1990s/early 2000s to 2005-2007) are quite remarkable. There has been a huge improvement in the quality of their multimedia releases, both in terms of picture quality, editing, and graphics.

AQ "Central's" al-Sahab media wing and al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghrib's media outlet have made the most visible advances. But one can even see improvements in the multimedia produced "second-tier" Salafi jihadi groups, such as Somalia's Harakat Shabab al-Mujahideen. Their videos and visual media/artwork was pretty rough only a year or two ago, but has improved drastically since then.

Two great studies of the internal diversity within the Salafi movement are Quintan Wiktorowicz's "Anatomy of the Salafi Movement" and Madawi al-Rasheed's Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices of a New Generation.